Q I have been sent e-mail from Spain with attached files with the extension .bin. The sender said ''The annexed document is a Word document. I think you have to decode the annex first at your side because I presume you have a BINary file as annex''. Can you tell me how to read it in Word please?

A The type of file you have is a binary file. What the sender may have done is compressed the file into a BinHex format. You require a program called Stuff-It Expander. This will then decode the file into the correct format.

Q I run Win 95, Word and Excel 97 plus a fax program called Bitware which runs in the background to receive faxes. The monitor is set to display a screen saver (3D flower box) after five minutes of keyboard/mouse inaction and to switch off after a further five minutes.

Occasionally, when ''waking'' the system up I get the following general protection fault which necessitates a reboot: from keyboard/mouse - "Explorer has caused a general protection fault in module USER.EXE at 0003.00005f9a" and from an incoming fax - "BFRECV has caused a general protection fault in module USER.EXE at 0003.00005f9a"

The problem is intermittent and may be absent for days before raising its head. Sometimes it may recur several times in one day.

A This is a tricky one. The problem that is occurring is system-based error. When the system is in screen saver mode, all of the system files remain active, so it is unlikely that you will receive any problems while the screen saver is active. I would assume the following problem is arising.

When the machine goes into sleep mode the hard disk and display shut down completely. The file user.exe provides the user interface code, this controls the input form peripherals, e.g. a mouse or keyboard. If an error occurs in the user.exe executable it is probably when the system is waking up, you may have a lot of data stored on your disk drive in the swop file.

If the hard disk does not spin up fast enough the system will stall and an error will occur in the user.exe as the peripheral response is not fast enough. The reason it does not happen all the time depends how much data resides in physical memory and swop file memory. The more data in the swop file memory the higher the chance of failure as the swop file resides on the hard disk.

The same goes for when a fax is received. The system cannot wake up fast enough to write data to the disk drive. I would recommend that you disable the hard drive spinning down or disabling the sleep mode and letting the screen saver do its job, this will probably have to be done from the bios.

Q I recently downloaded a screen saver from the Internet, and installed it. However, whenever the screen saver comes on, it is just a black screen, with the message ''there is not enough memory to run the screen saver''. How can I increase the memory to individual items such as a screen saver, with Windows 95?

A In Windows 95 there is no way off allocating resources to separate programs unlike Macintosh's. Windows 95 controls its own memory settings because it is a multi-tasking system which allocates resources as required. I would recommend removing as many TSRs (Terminate Stay Resident programs) from your autoexec.bat and config.sys. Windows 95 has its own dynamic 32-bit drivers that it will use. Be very careful what you remove, in the config.sys leave the following "Device=c:\*****\**cdrom.sys *******".

This loads the recogniser for the cd-rom if it is not PnP (Plug and Play), also leave any lines which contain the following ''codepage'' or ''country.sys'', these control your location in the world and timestamps for Windows 95.

In reference to the above situation of memory allocation. On a Macintosh if you select the application icon press keys Apple and I for information on the application. In the bottom right hand side of the message box it will display memory requirements for that application. You can increase these manually to provide better performance to the application.

Q I am having a problem when I dial into my service provider for the Internet. I am receiving data for a short while and then I recieve the comment ''stalled'' at the bottom of my browser, after this I cannot browse any pages.

A The problem you are suffering is a very common problem experienced from dial up web surfers. The way that the Internet works is when you request a web page a ''data packet'' is sent to that page's server. When the server receives that data packet, the packet contains information on where the server is to send the return information e.g. the web page or file requested.

If the remote server has a lot of requests at once, your data packet may be refused and your machine will send another packet requesting the same information. If the server continues to refuse your packet the connection between your machine and the server may time out as each connection has a ''time to live TTL''.

If this happens your connection will stall. One way to get round this is to bring up a command screen or dos prompt and try the following command ''Ping thepageyouaretryingtoreach'' this will re-establish the connection to the machine and packets may start flowing again.

There is also a nice wee program called Net-Medic which can be downloaded from www.download.com. This gives full diagnostics on your Internet connection and will diagnose most common problems.

Q I am trying to make backup copies of my Windows 95 disks but I cannot copy them on to 1.44Mb disks, are they

protected in some way?

A Windows 95 disks are Distributed Media Format disks and are not compatible with the MS-DOS copy and Diskcopy commands.

Not all applications are good desktop citizens. On occasion you'll quit

or switch out of an

application and find that your Mac displays an odd collection of colors, or pieces of the desktop appear to be missing. Here's an easy way to force the Mac desktop to redraw. If your Control Strip is active, select a different color depth-switch from Thousands of Colors to 256 Colors,

for example.

Go ahead and switch it back to the original setting once you've made the initial switch. The

purpose is to redraw the desktop, not to force you to use more or less colours.

If you're Control

Strip-less, just open the Monitors- or Monitors and Sound control panel and make the switch there. You could also change your monitor's resolution to accomplish this, but your icons may be displaced in the process.

PC

If you have the 3D Text screen saver (part of the OEM Service Release 2 version of Windows 95), here's a neat trick: Type ''volcano'' as the text for this screen saver, and it will rotate through names of famous volcanoes. Follow these steps:

Right-click the desktop, select Properties, and click the Screen Saver tab. Select 3D Text in the list of screen savers, click the Settings button, and under Display, type ''volcano'' on the Text line.

Adjust the other options to your liking, click OK, and on the

preview screen, you'll see this Easter Egg in action. Click OK again to keep the screen saver active.